Popular Reviews
The Parenting
Brian Cox apparently gets a bit sick of being asked in interviews about Succession and playing Logan Roy, which might explain his presence in The Parenting, a film unafraid to do jokes about projectile vomiting alongside a whole slew (spew?) of gags revived from the era of gross-out comedy. Look, this says, I’m an actor, now doing something completely different, alright, because that’s what acting is. Craig Johnson is the director and Kent Sublette the writer, but it’s the Farrelly or Wayans brothers who really preside over this movie – comedy done with a wink and a how-low-can-you-go chuckle. It’s a Meet the Parents set-up. Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh (Brandon Flynn) are … Read more
Rize
Fashion photographer and music-video director David LaChapelle’s documentary about Krumping, the brutally physical, adrenalised street dance movement in South Central LA which rose, in the aftermath of the 1992’s Rodney King riots, from the Clowning movement. Yes, clowning as in painting the face and putting on big baggy clothes. Think rap face-to-face showdowns, but instead of spinning rhymes they do the most ridiculously amazing dances with their body, the court of audience opinion more often than not deciding the winner. Both clowning and now krumping are a leftfield response to deprivation and the added blight of the gang culture and originally allowed those who do it to pass unmolested from one gang district … Read more
Desire
1936’s Desire is the sort of film Hollywood has always excelled at. A bit of this, that and the other – some fun, some jeopardy, some romance – parcelled up beautifully and sold by attractive people who are looking their best. Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in this case. The best bit actually comes at the outset, when Dietrich is playing two men off against each other by telling each man she’s married to the other. On one side a jeweller (Ernest Cossart), from whom she’s trying to steal a priceless string of pearls. On the other a shrink (Alan Mowbray), who is apparently supposed to be buying the pearls though he knows … Read more
The Last of Sheila
As namechecked by Rian Johnson while out on the promotion trail, The Last of Sheila looks like a good chunk of the inspiration for his Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery. Adding to its attraction are the names of the bizarre writing team behind this whodunit from 1973: Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim. It was the only screenplay either of them would ever write and sprang from the murder-mystery evenings they used to put on for a bit of fun in New York. The director Herbert Ross, then probably most famous for directing Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, was at one of them and suggested Hopkins and Sondheim work one of … Read more
Nobody
“Who the fuck are you?” two cops ask the bloody guy they’ve got sitting over the table from them, in some sort of interview situation. “I’m, er…” he says. And boom, up on the screen comes the single word in giant letters, NOBODY, and this head-clearing mix of extreme violence and dry comedy gets underway. The nobody is feeding a kitten from a tin of tuna, by the way. A movie-length flashback answers the cops’ question. The guy is called Hutch Mansell. Director Ilya Naishuller and writer Derek Kolstad quick-cut-montage a picture of his humdrum existence. A suburban husband and father who does the routine things that dads with two school-age kids do, … Read more
The Battle of the Sexes
Telling the story of the hyperhyped tennis match between 55-year-old “male chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs and the then reigning queen of tennis, Billie Jean King, this deceptively light documentary catches the casual and systemic sexism of the time, paints a warm, human picture of King and even has the grace to give the publicity hungry Riggs, now long dead, a decent screw. And the match really was hyped. If you were alive back then there is no way you won’t remember the furore when Riggs, who’d won Wimbledon in 1939 but had long since slipped into obscurity, came out of retirement to make a loud public announcement – the women’s game was feeble, … Read more
Nomadland
In January 2011 the US Gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada, shut down. By July of the same year the town’s zip code had been discontinued. Nomadland makes personal a phenomenon that’s been going on for decades but has accelerated since the big crash of 2008. Of displaced older blue-collar workers who lose their homes and jobs and take to the road, travelling around the US working at any job they can, living out of cars, vans and recreational vehicles, a new nomad class. The film is based on the 2018 book by Jessica Bruder, an extended piece of non-fiction reporting detailing the phenomenon, and stars Frances McDormand as Fern – the only person … Read more
Malignant
One word titles suggesting ugginess are a bit of a specialty for James Wan – Saw, Insidious and now Malignant, a never frightening but entirely entertaining tour of the all-you-can-eat horror buffet. The writer/producer/director piles on a whole load of stuff, then a bit more, and then more still. If nothing else, you have to admire the size of his plate. It all starts pre-credits with one of those sequences set inside some murky clinical facility where a medical team are trying to subdue someone or thing and finding themselves up against it. The thing, or whatever it is, seems to be “drinking electricity”. Hold on to that thought – and then later … Read more
Loving Highsmith
Delicately ambiguous as a title, Loving Highsmith also turns out to be a clever way of signalling the approach of its director, Eva Vitija, to its subject matter. It is both fan letter to the writer of classics such as Strangers on a Train (she really loves her Highsmith), and an attempt to delve into the love life of the author herself – what Highsmith was like to love. Highsmith’s dates are 1921 to 1995 but you’ll struggle to get that information out of this documentary. It isn’t full of details of that sort, and there isn’t particularly a timeline that can clearly be followed. Watch it with the Wikipedia page to one … Read more
Zorro: Who Is That Masked Man?
The Mexicans like their heroes the way they like their tacos – with cheese. Enter Zorro. Cue mask, cape and ludicrous pencil moustache Next time you’re in London, try the Robin Hood Zorro restaurant in Hammersmith. This oddly conceived English/Mexican hybrid serves an equally odd drink called the Robin Hood Meets Zorro cocktail. A mouthful to order and a hell of a thing to drink, it contains tequila, gin and beer. The menu doesn’t say it’s served with a bucket, but it probably should be. What is it about Zorro that seems to bring out the naffness in … well, everything? It was not always thus. Dial back to the mists of the … Read more
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The film that put the Italian giallo genre on the international map, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo) is Dario Argento’s directing debut and the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s first film in colour. It’s archetypal giallo in many ways. Archetypal Argento, too, you could say, for bad and good. Formless plotting but a good twist, abrupt psychological transitions but beautifully sustained mood, a schoolboy approach to sexuality (ooh, look, a nipple) but a heightened sense of threat. Argento wrote it in five days and came up with a story he’d re-use multiple times, of an artist of some sort (a writer, in this case), a foreigner (American here) … Read more
John and the Hole
John and the Hole is a story written by Nicolás Giacobone, so there’s a weird element along with the everyday. He also wrote Birdman, which interspersed familiar scenes of an actor in crisis preparing for a show with moments where he’d be transformed into the superhero he’d played years before. In Biutiful, the 2010 movie starring Javier Bardem, the story of a man dying of cancer is interpolated with moments of magical realism. John and the Hole does the same, but differently. At one level it’s a straightforward story of a 13-year-old boy who might be on the autistic spectrum – he’s certainly very closed off and has a knack for mathematics – who … Read more
